126301-soulbound-rewards-from-contracts
Content ---- ---- ---- My alts are already leveled, but I'd actually play them if I had more account bound items and rewards. Just the thought of attunement and the amp/ability grind keeps me away from that, not to mention dyes and mounts. | |} ---- Agreed. If more stiff was account bound I would have a lot more of a reason to work on my neglected alts. Honestly, I don't know why they made costumes account-bound but the dyes used on them are still character bound. | |} ---- Well, its not effective at all. I have alts as well and I dont play them. I dont mind grinding or clearing 100% of zone but all the dailies,contracts,reputations,attunement and load of other things take a lot of time - I dont mind it as well as long as I do it on 1 character. Requirement to do it all again in the shadow of RNG on each character makes me hit "Logout". Account bount and BoE would allow us to skip annoying and boring stuff, level up more alts and actually enjoy playing them. Instead i have a fleet of ships in my bank - if i could donate them to Dominion Military we would have more fighters than people to fly them, would be even enough to give one to Kiviuq... | |} ---- I've often wondered about the rationale behind this as well, but I don't think this is the underlying thought--or at least, I hope it isn't. Because soulbinding doesn't encourage alts at all. It says "if you want to make another character, you must repeat the various things that you did on your first character regardless of the replay value of those things". Soulbinding also doesn't encourage CREDD sales, because it removes high value items from the market--although in fairness, it does encourage CREDD sales that are used to obtain carries through content. I think instead the rationale is likely to be incentivizing players to engage particular activities. One of my characters has a housing plot remodel where I found myself thinking it'd be great to have a Resold Marauder Anchor holding an island in place. I'd seen them as decor items back at launch, so I knew they existed. I watched the AH for a few weeks, waiting to see if one would ever appear. None ever did. Why not? Because it turns out that now they're BoP and only drop from the Crimelords of Whitevale. If you want that housing decor item, you must run that adventure until you get it. No amount of running any other content will earn you the resources to obtain it by any other means. I would imagine that this is a great way to inflate the fraction of the playerbase that runs a particular type of content. Stick in a bunch of shinies that can only be obtained by running that content. If you don't like that particular type of content but do want the shinies, you either: 1) run it anyway for the shinies even though you don't want to; 2) stay in the game and simply live without the shinies; or 3) leave the game and find one that won't force you into things you don't want to do just for some fluff items. Since the game tracks analytics like "do people who run this content stay with the game?", how do these players influence that metric? Players who choose option 1 boost that metric by running content they don't enjoy just to get the shinies. Importantly, players who choose option 3 also boost that metric by not running that content and subsequently leaving the game. Players who choose option 2 decrease that metric, demonstrating a clear need to increase the incentives for that content and force them into options 1 or 3. This is a great example of a perverse incentive for game developers. They do better in the metrics by forcing players to either run their content or leave, regardless of which of those two options most players will choose. | |} ---- ---- ---- Choose your analytics... wisely. | |} ----